Desperate Women, Desperate Doctors and the Surprising History Behind the Breastfeeding Debate

For something that’s supposed to be a natural process, breastfeeding can be surprisingly complicated — and not only for new mothers literally struggling with the process. Breastfeeding debates can leave families feeling embattled from both sides, but controversy over who should breastfeed and for how long and where shows no signs of letting up. For example, in July, news broke that the United States had fought a seemingly uncontroversial resolution in support of breastfeeding at the World Health Assembly earlier this spring. But, though such controversies can seem like a distinctly modern problem, breastfeeding has long been fraught. When historian Jacqueline H. Wolf began researching the history of breastfeeding, the questions she found American women facing a century ago weren’t so different from those faced today: who gets to do it and how, and what everyone else thinks about that. With World Breastfeeding Week starting Wednesday, Wolf — who is a professor of the history of medicine at Ohio University and the author of Don’t Kill Your Baby: Public Health and the Decline of Breastfeeding in the 19th and 20th Centuries and, recently, Cesarean Section: An American History of Risk, Technology, and Consequence — spoke to TIME about the historical “baggage” that makes breastfeeding such a controversial topic. How did you come to research the history of breastfeeding? I was a graduate student when I was pregnant. I was going to be ...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized health onetime Source Type: news